Today, Chef Tom Colicchio hosted a private lunch sponsored by Microsoft and Bing and at his restaurant, Craft. In addition to feeding us a marvelous meal and giving a hand’s on cooking demonstration, he also showed everyone how the new Food & Drink app from Bing worked.

Food & Drink is designed for both new and seasoned cooks alike. The app features an extensive library of recipes from popular food websites, cookbooks and bloggers. It also highlights some of the world’s best chefs, including Wolfgang Puck and Tom Colicchio giving not only their bios, but recipes and good tips too.

After you have decided on your menu, you can choose the perfect wine pairing from an included wine encyclopedia and you can add everything right to a shopping list that can be printed or emailed. The best part is the Hands-Free Cooking Mode that lets you use hand swipes to navigate through recipes while you cook, so you never have to touch your device with dirty hands. But it is spill proof so just in case, you’ll still be safe!

Here are some of the tips Chef shared with us to have a successful Thanksgiving:

Chef Tom Colicchio and Top Three Tips for a Successful Thanksgiving:

1. Prepare ahead of time. It’s really important to get all of your prep work done before you actually begin cooking. Gather your mise en place –complete all of your knife work and get your portions together and ready. This will help you save time and you’ll have a much smoother cooking experience. The key to a successful holiday is to be able to spend time with your guests. the more you can do beforehand the less you will be in the kitchen and more at the table.

2. While it’s fun to try new dishes at Thanksgiving, experiment with only one dish, not the whole meal. This way, your tried and true recipes will save the day if that one dish isn’t quite up to par.

3. Start with ingredients, not a recipe. You can gather inspiration from recipes, but by purchasing fresh, seasonal ingredients and thinking about all the combinations, textures and balances, you will let your ingredients become the recipe.

I have the first two tips down, but the third one, I should try to use that method more. I usually start with my recipe and improvise from there-but the opposite is certainly more creative and thought provoking.

It was a really fun lunch and the food, of course, was just brilliant. Simple and elegant but incredibly flavorful.

We started with the Pumpkin Agnolotti. It was so flavorful- with fried pumpkin seeds, a light butter, herb cream sauce and billowy ravioli. I could have eaten a whole entree size full!

The entree as a Striped Bass with multicolored cauliflower. Also very light.

Dessert was a simple roasted apple with a puffed pastry shell and cinnamon ice cream.

The app was really cool and if you have no idea what to get me for Christmas, the Surface would be a good start. (wink)